JLM, there is a lot of debate about the testing methods you describe, and I believe the speaker positioning machine was built by Harman, who Toole and Olive currently work for. I do believe their results are valuable, especially the results of blind vs sighted testing and the correlation of anechoic spin testing to listener preference. But Harman isn't going to give all their research away to inform every speaker designer in the world they are competing with and imo, the information given is enough to give a boost to their marketing but there is very little to no valuable information for a speaker designer to actually use. Honestly, we didn't need anechoic spin test results to tell us people prefer a flat FR with smooth off-axis response, thus a matching of dispersion of overlapping drivers at the xo point... this has also been spelled out by Geddes and others and is probably pretty high on any designer's priority list, it's in the "common sense" category of design priorities imo.
Also, those speaker listening tests using the shuffling machine test a single loudspeaker in the exact same position in the room, powered by rather cheap Proceed amplifiers. Obviously, there may be some issues with this kind of test as it doesn't take into account the different dispersion patterns of speakers, in fact they published results using Martin Logan (dipole) vs conventional cone and dome speakers set up the exact same way. In other words, there is no stereo, no optimized positioning and no optimized acoustic treatments to account for the differences in speaker design. And hopefully the amplifier works equally well for every speaker they test.
Anechoic chambers and speaker shuffling machines aren't exactly cheap and the results may not be informative, especially to someone who designs single driver speakers, so why would you possibly expect these kinds of measurements? You continually pick on Omega for not publishing measurements, but you're seriously picking on the wrong company. People don't buy single driver speakers for the measurements, and I'm sure you know the FR of a single driver isn't going to compare well to an active studio monitor with DSP, so why bother? Nobody cares, if flat FR were the top priority in choosing a speaker nobody would ever buy single driver speakers. They have other qualities people do value and I can say without a doubt people put emphasis on the wrong measurements and interpret them in wrong ways. Interpreting measurements takes a lot of experience and the fact is IF Omega did publish measurements the information will be abused and interpreted wrongly by a great majority of people.
Finally, Srajan's comment was about someone who actually designs drivers using every magnet material available, so it's not just any old opinion. It's the opinion of a rare expert on the subject and most people would find that sort of information valuable. Personally, I don't find the Omega 6.5" Alnico to be superior to the RS5 in every way, there are tradeoffs and the differences are mostly subjective imo. In many ways I think the RS5 is more accurate, but the micro detail and overall presentation of the alnico driver might be preferable to some.
